You may have read a review I wrote last month on one of Keogh’s other books, and you may remember that it was a pretty good read. So a couple of books down the line, I decide to give another one a try. This time I’ve started with her Nicola Connelly series…

What I loved most about this book was Keogh’s natural talent for POV jumping. So the novel starts in first person. It actually starts right, right, right at the beginning of our main character, literally at her birth and we manage to cover a number of years in a very short amount of time. This may be a tactic that many of us avoid simply because not only has it been done a hundred times, and not only does it bog the opening of the story down, it’s a successful trap for poor writing. However, Keogh has somehow managed to pull it off. She’s traversed the narrow slope of ‘birth-beginnings’ and emerged on the other side with a reader hungry for more.

When we do eventually swap to a third person point of view, and fast forward a few years, I love how she maintains a third-person limited narrative. The reason I love it so much is because it constantly jumps throughout the remainder of the story, and I don’t mean between chapters, but between paragraphs. We can start a chapter with DI Matt Foley, swap to Tom Hudson and end with Nicola. For some that might be mind-blowing, but for someone who loves this writing style, I was enjoying every second!

I loved how Keogh painted such a clear picture of Connolly and once again her descriptive skills were put to good use by being concise and accurate without having to drag on. I would have liked to have seen a little more variety in the way she described particular scenes, in regards to Connolly’s reactions to her nightmares and the police team working away on the leads that came in. To be honest though, that really isn’t a criticism as it didn’t detract from the story and I found myself desperate to reach the end, find out how it was all related and for them to catch the killer.

Oh and P.S. the end is literally mind-blowing! Loved it 🙂

This is book 1 of Keogh’s Nicola Connolly series and it can be purchased here.

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